For Kim Hicks, the choice to build on McKee Road 26 years ago was deliberate. She and her husband wanted rural life — space for their boys to grow up in the woods, to splash in Kindle Creek, to know their neighbors. Earlier this week, she stood before the Columbus City Council and asked them not to take it away.
“Building the data center in the middle of one of the few rural areas we have left will be a poor decision,” Hicks said. “The proposed data center will destroy hundreds of acres of beautiful nature, and displace the wildlife that lived there. And it will bring noise and light to our communities.”
Hicks was one of dozens of residents who filled council chambers to speak against Project Ruby, a proposed large-scale data center planned for a roughly 900-acre site in the Upatoi area of Muscogee County. A Change.org petition opposing the project has collected more than 3,200 signatures.
The Columbus Consolidated Government is currently drafting a technology overlay zone, a special zoning category that would establish ground rules for data centers, before any formal application from the developer moves forward. But for many residents, the meeting made clear that the rules being written to protect them are not yet written well enough, and that the people writing them have a financial interest in seeing the project succeed.
“It is not an if. It’s a when.”
Columbus State University student John Legalis cut to what many residents were circling around but hadn’t said directly.
“When these companies begin to exploit us, and it is not an if, it’s a when, no one will be able to stop them,” Legalis said.
His argument was specific: the fines Columbus could levy against Apple, Amazon, Meta, or Google, the kind of company likely to occupy a facility like Project Ruby, are meaningless. Companies that size absorb regulatory penalties as a cost of doing business. He noted that Missy Kendrick of Choose Columbus, the city’s development authority, had said publicly she does not want to over-regulate the project for fear of losing the client.
“If there’s anything worth over-regulating, it’s this,” Legalis said.
Councilwoman Charmaine Crabb, an attorney, offered a partial answer. She said she would fight to keep any legal disputes in Muscogee County courts rather than allowing them to go to arbitration, a provision she called non-negotiable.
“I will die on my hill if they do not submit to local jurisdiction if something happens,” Crabb said. She noted that her firm has secured multi-billion dollar verdicts against Meta, Amazon, and other technology companies, and that local jurisdiction is a more meaningful enforcement tool than fines alone.
While her words were strong, they did not address Legalis’s underlying point: that no regulatory framework currently exists, that the one being drafted has already been found to have gaps, and that the city’s development authority is simultaneously writing the rules and recruiting the tenant.
The rules aren’t ready
Attorney Steve Craft came to the meeting with research and a specific problem.
The draft overlay ordinance, the document that will govern how a data center must operate in Columbus, contains a noise provision limiting continuous operation at a given decibel level to 30 minutes. But it does not define how long the break must be before the clock resets. As written, a facility could run at full noise for 30 minutes, pause for five minutes, and repeat indefinitely without technically violating the ordinance.
Missy Kendrick of Choose Columbus, the city’s development, when pressed, acknowledged she had not considered that gap.
“That is a great thing to make sure we put in our overlay district,” she said.
Craft raised a broader concern as well. The jobs figure most often cited for Project Ruby, 100 to 250 high-paying positions, depends entirely on whether the facility will have an on-site network operations center. A “light site” with local operations staff could mean 150 to 300 jobs. A “dark site” controlled remotely means 25 to 50 maintenance and security positions. Craft said the city does not yet have that answer.
“We’re being asked to make a 50-plus year land and infrastructure commitment based on a 20-year economic projection made by people who will not be in this community in 20 years,” Craft said.
A community pushes back
Justin Sellers, whose family has owned property six miles from the proposed site for nearly 20 years, focused on what gets destroyed before the first server is ever switched on.
“There are at least two significant creeks that run through this proposed site,” Sellers said. “These trees are doing more than just creating oxygen. They’re providing soil integrity, protecting the ability for the ground to hold water, and allowing species and ecosystems to thrive and flourish.”
Sellers raised the gopher tortoise specifically, Georgia’s state reptile and a protected keystone species whose burrows shelter hundreds of other species. The main threat to gopher tortoises is habitat loss.
Kendrick said the developer’s conceptual footprint covers about 15% of the roughly 900-acre property and that there is no intent to clear-cut the full site. She said any formal application would trigger a Development of Regional Impact review, a state process that includes wetlands delineation and endangered species studies.
That process comes later. The overlay ordinance being drafted now would set the ground rules before any of those studies are required.
Council weighs $5.1 billion against what residents stand to lose
Councilman Glenn Davis made the case for the project in economic terms, comparing its potential impact to the 2005 Base Realignment and Closure process that brought significant military expansion to Fort Benning during the Great Recession.
“You’re talking about a matter here, and I just want you to think about it in perspective, $5.1 billion,” Davis said. “The adrenaline infusion that it would provide for our small businesses and the impact that it would have and the residual jobs that come along with it.”
Davis said he and his wife spent three days in Fayetteville, Georgia, near the state’s film studios, where a data center operates close to residential development. He said he did not experience the noise or disruption residents described.
Resident Caroline Rowell offered a direct rebuttal to the economic argument, drawing on what she said was the documented history of data center development in other communities.
“The jobs are not what they appear,” Rowell said. “Construction work is temporary. When the cranes leave, so do the paychecks. The operational roles are overwhelmingly filled by outsourced contractors and specialized workers recruited from outside of our community.”
She called tax revenue the only tangible benefit that holds up under scrutiny and noted that large technology companies routinely negotiate multi-year tax abatements that reduce their actual contribution to the local tax base. She asked that all tax incentives, abatements, and infrastructure costs be made fully public before any vote is taken.
Across the county line
Near the end of the meeting, Councilwoman Crabb asked Kendrick a pointed question: if the project does not move forward in Muscogee County, where does it go?
Kendrick’s answer was direct. Property owners just across the Talbot County line have already contacted her about making their land available to the project.
The implication was clear: if Columbus says no, the data center gets built a mile away, outside Columbus regulations, with no local jurisdiction, no overlay ordinance, and no community benefit agreement, and residents in the Upatoi area live next to it anyway.
For opponents of the project, it was a clarifying moment. The choice before council may not be between having a data center and not having one. It may be between having one with rules set by Columbus and having one without them.
What comes next
Councilwoman Toyia Tucker called for all relevant agencies, Columbus Waterworks, Flint Energies, the developer, and Habitat Real Estate Partners, to appear together at a single public meeting rather than in separate forums where questions from one session can’t be answered by officials from another.
“Bring everybody who’s at the table and let them speak all at one time in one meeting,” Tucker said.
City Councilman Gary Allen said officials are arranging a large public meeting in the Upatoi area and expect to announce it within one to two weeks.
The overlay district must be approved before any formal rezoning application can be filed. After that, the project would require a separate rezoning application and a Development of Regional Impact review, a state process that includes studies of wetlands, endangered species, and historic preservation.
The rules are still being written. The residents who will live under them showed up to make sure whoever is writing them was listening.
